Machine type communication is increasingly used in cellular access networks, as well as in information and telecommunications systems in general. Examples of systems using machine type communication devices for machine type communication operations may include:                remotely controlled power meters as well as metering machine type communication devices,        remotely controlled machine type communication devices for controlling functions e.g. in a home which make it possible to turn on an heating prior to arriving home.        
In addition to such examples of stationary machine type communication, there are also applications of mobile machine type communication, such as remotely monitoring and/or controlling functions or status information in a car, boat, or some other kind of vehicle.
An important increase in signalling traffic and in data traffic in cellular access systems can be expected due to the vast amount of possible applications for machine type communication, machine type communication devices and machine type communication systems.
A machine type communication device may be connected through cellular access networks to mobile communication networks, the access networks may include GSM (Global System of Mobile Communication) access networks, GPRS (General Packet Radio System) access networks, and/or EPS/LTE (Evolved Packet System/Long Term Evolution) access networks. Typically, a machine type communication device will have relatively low mobility, low data consumption and infrequent communication. In addition, many, if not most, types of applications of machine type communication will be delay tolerant, i.e. they will not be real time applications, as opposed to traditional applications of cellular access networks, such as speech, streaming of data etc. In many cases, the application in which a machine type communication device is used needs the machine type communication device to report data, or it may happen that the machine type communication server needs to transmit data to the machine type communication device. This is typically realized via an Internet Protocol connection (IP connection) which necessitates a PDP context/IP bearer. A PDP (packet data protocol; e.g., IP, X.25, FrameRelay) context is a data structure which is typically present on both the serving GPRS support node (SGSN) and the gateway GPRS support node (GGSN). This data structure contains the session information when a session is active. When a machine type communication device wants to use GPRS, it needs first to attach and then activate a PDP context. This allocates a PDP context data structure in the serving GPRS support node that the machine type communication device is currently visiting and the serving GPRS support node that is serving the access point used by the machine type communication device.
Typically, a machine type communication device that, at a point in time, is not reachable via an Internet Protocol connection (IP connection), i.e. it has no PDP context/IP bearer or that it uses NAT (Network Address Translation) such that at least parts of the machine type communication device are not reachable, is typically triggered by a short message (SMS, Short Message System) to perform an action (such as starting a service within the machine type communication device) that ultimately establishes a connection to an Internet Protocol server.
However, the use of IP connections and/or short messages involves comparably high costs in term of signalling overhead and/or delay and/or requirements on the side of the machine type communication device, such as a process (in the machine type communication device) that is capable to react to incoming short messages and to parse their content. Moreover, in these cases protocol stacks are needed in the machine type communication device, which also may also lead to large signalling overhead and bandwidth consumption on the network side.